I thought of this remark by JackCade about the Mr. Goodbuy lists: He said the lists and the data were supposed to be a mechanical approach to finding BMWm candidate stocks.

I never thought that it was advisable to buy the top stocks on a given list, and I myself really only paid attention to lists that took the dividend yield into account. I pretty much ignored the other lists.

But then, I thought, the next step would have been to back-test the screens -- as one does with any mechanical method -- and find the one which was most useful in predicting BMWm success.

But, now that I think about it, the BMW method was not really ONE method that lent itself to back-testing, but a whole family of methods that probably varied a lot from person to person. (As I indicated above, I myself considered dividends as part of the BMW method, but I can imagine that others would use the method without regard to dividends.) Some people (like Jim) probably used the BMW method to great effect; others (like me) struggle with trying to use it.

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